Bugging Out For Gold  

I'm definitely not a gold bug, so I'm even more concerned than Cryptogon about people trying to avoid falling prices of everything by sticking their money into gold en-masse (assuming its actually true) - People Line Up to Buy Gold in Britain. Its worth remembering the long term return on gold over decades is woeful - look at what happened to people who bought in last time it was around the US$900 mark.

I’m concerned to be reading “selling the house to buy” gold stories…

I hope people are taking a “Big Picture” view of the situation. And I say that as a BullionVault client and affiliate.

Many eggs. Many baskets.

Now, with caveats out of the way, if any more than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of people actually start moving their life’s savings into physical gold, as this story suggests is happening—and I have no idea if this is just dealers spraying bullshit around to drum up business—there is nowhere near enough physical gold to meet demand at these prices.

I hate writing these things. It puts me in the company of the snake handling gold bugs, from the newsletter industrial complex, who have been wrong for decades. But this isn’t about me, and it’s not about the snake handling gold bugs. This is about grannies and housewives and pissed off executives and scared shitless workers from many different walks of life saying, “F*@# this, I’m buying gold and I don’t care what happens to the price because it can’t go to zero like my confetti paper promises to pay. Take your banks, your stock market, your government bailouts and insert it! Give me gold.”

People buying the gold ETFs is one thing, but lining up to buy tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds worth of physical gold at a time…

We are definitely moving into a different phase.

Via: Telegraph:

Savers have been queuing in the street to buy gold bars and coins, as they search for a safe place to invest their money.

London’s two leading bullion dealers, ATS Bullion and Baird & Co, have reported a rush of interest from savers, many of whom have hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of savings they want to convert into the precious metal.

At least two customers have invested the entire proceeds from selling their houses into gold, each buying up more than £500,000-worth of gold bars, according to one dealer.